A summer lamentation
Yesterday was the 69th birthday of Sparky, the puppy I got for my 8th birthday in 1956. He died at age one, and is buried under the parking lot at the Boulevard Square strip mall that paves the paradise of scrub oak and pitch pines that was our summer playground at the edge of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens in what is now the 13th-largest municipality in the state. Sparky was hit by a car while hunting for love. Beside Sparky lies Kim, another “intact” male dog who died a year before we got Sparky, and a parakeet named Poco. Kim was also killed by a car, likely for the same reason. Poco went missing one day and was found years later behind a spare door that partly covered the studs of an open wall in our summer home. His coffin was an empty cereal box.
My family had one dog after that: a small fox terrier named Sissy, who wasn’t. My parents got her at age four, and she lived another ten years. Her whole purpose in life was getting the ball and bringing it back so people could throw it again. Unlike most dogs, she knew that the only way the ball would get thrown was if she deposited it at your feet or on your lap. If there were more than one person, she would make them take turns. As an adult, I have had only two pets in my long life. The first was a sweet little Labrador mix named Pogo that I picked up in my senior year in college and had to give away not long after, because our apartment complex in Hackensack didn’t allow pets. Many years after that, I got my teenage son a fluffy gray kitten that he named Ernie, who lasted about a year before he was killed by a car on our quiet suburban street in Palo Alto.
Since then my life has been too itinerant for pets, or even plants. I do enjoy pets, though—as long as they’re not mine.
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